[chris485]

My pc crashed a couple of days ago. So I tried reformating my hard drive ( which i did lots of times sucsefully). Unfortunatly this time it will not work.After formating my c drive i went to setup my windows. After doing this my pc says "Standard mode: fault outside ms-dos extender" it also has a lot of #'s following it. So i try to setup windows again and this time it works. After window 98 setup finishes the pc restarts and it says "Invaild vxd dynamic link call to device number3, service b. Your windows configuration is invailid. Run windows setup". So I try setup again and it still dosn't work. What should I do.

Please help.

P.S (Before doing all of this I also went to fdisk and deleted all my partitions and created just 1 primary partition)

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From the description it sounds like there are defects on the hard drive disk right where important windows files need to be placed. Did you run a thorough scandisk on the drive before you reformatted? If not I would use a boot floppy to start the machine and run scandisk. In ms-dos mode it will make some quick checks then ask if you want a thorough scan. It will give you a visual of the condition of the disk. It will "repair" the disk by telling the file system not to write to or read from the defective parts, but not actually repair the surface. A few bad spots are OK, any concentration of them in an area means the disk is failing. The machine I'm on right now has two defects on the disk and was having problems before I ran scandisk.

[Tyger]

From the description it sounds like there are defects on the hard drive disk right where important windows files need to be placed. Did you run a thorough scandisk on the drive before you reformatted? If not I would use a boot floppy to start the machine and run scandisk. In ms-dos mode it will make some quick checks then ask if you want a thorough scan. It will give you a visual of the condition of the disk. It will "repair" the disk by telling the file system not to write to or read from the defective parts, but not actually repair the surface. A few bad spots are OK, any concentration of them in an area means the disk is failing. The machine I'm on right now has two defects on the disk and was having problems before I ran scandisk.

[chris485]

Thank you Tyger for quick response,

I ran a thorough scandisk with my start up disk. After scandisk was complete it said there was no problems with my drives. My problem right now is after i complete my window 98 setup my pc turns on and after the windows 98 page goes by my pc say's "Invaid vxd dynamic link cell in device number 3, service b.Your windows configuration is invailid. Run windows setup program". After running windows setup i still get the same problem. So i tried reformating my pc again. I normaly reformat by going to fdisk first deleating my partions and creating just one. After this i turn my pc off. Then I format my c drive with win98 cd support. Then I do my setup with win98 cd support. But last night i used "start windows 98 setup from cd-rom".The blue screen. After the program formats my C drive it says "An error was detected while formatting your primary hard disk partition". Again before i did this i went to fdisk and deleated my old partition and made a new one. I don't understand what is wrong.

please help

[Tyger]

I sure don't understand what's wrong either. There may be a defect (dust) on the cd-rom disk. Something else you could try is completely writing the drive to zeros, low level formatting it. Sometimes this will "rescue" a drive. You will need to use fdisk and reformat it, and then run scandisk again. If that doesn't work, I'd say get another hard drive. They're certainly cheap enough these days.

[chris485]

what do you mean writing the drives to zero. Do you want me to go in fdisk and make my drive zero

[Tyger]

what do you mean writing the drives to zero. Do you want me to go in fdisk and make my drive zero

What brand of drive is it? Go to the drive maker's website and download their software. You can use it to make a bootable floppy that can be used to low level format, i.e. write to zeros, the drive. You can also use it to run full diagnostics on it.

[chris485]

o.k i will try that thanks

[chris485]

Hey Tyger,

Sorry it took so long for me to reply back. Good news my pc now works. I did what you said and downloaded a bootable disk for my hard drive. I was able to completly erase my hard drive with the disk. After I was done I was able to setup up my Windows. When I was finished setting up my windows my pc still had a few problems. I keep on getting a message saying i was missing the file vnetsup and my pc keep on opening in safe mode. After restarting my pc 5 times I was finally able to open it in normal mode. Then I installed My windows ME upgrade and it took care of that problem. I now have everything loaded on my pc and it is back to normal. The only problem I have now is that I can't restart my pc. If I try to restart my computer it only opens in safe mode. But if I shut down my pc and turn off my power bar it will work fine and open in normal mode on the first try. It's really annoying when you install a program that restarts itself. I have to wait beside the pc to unplug it before it starts back up. Because if I don't it will open in safe mode and I can't complete the instalation in safe mode. Do you know why I can't do a normal restart?

PS( Thanks for the help, fixing my computer.)

[Tyger]

You might want to go into Setup and also Control Panel and checking on the power settings. You want to have ACPI enabled, that's advanced configuration power interface, or some such.

[chris485]

My ACPI was disabled so I enabled it in my settings, but I still have the same problem. Also when I go to control panel I don,t have an option to change my power settings. All I have is "power options" and all I can do in here is specify how long I want my stuff to run after not touching my pc for extended periods of time.